Date a Girl who Travels... And Have Kids if you Want

KEYS to the joys of family travel

Yesterday, for the first time, I read what is apparently a blog post that went viral 10 years ago called Don’t Date a Girl Who Travels. The link on medium only has 3,900 likes (note: I wish COVID had gone viral like that), but it was on the author’s now defunct blog, and was reprinted on Huffpost, so I imagine it had many, many more readers. (Note: It went viral like ebola maybe? We really need a new term for when something on the internet catches fire post-COVID.) Apparently it was translated into 33 languages, so presumably it generated considerable interest since, despite my use of the passive voice, someone, or around 33 someones, had to do the translating. I discovered it only because a talented travel blogger named Claire did a sort of retrospective on it ten years later. You should give both the original and Claire’s commentary a read if you haven’t. They’re interesting.

I missed the original, possibly because I was, blessedly, less online then, but probably because I was getting married six days later—to a girl (note: woman) who travels. Reading it now, I find that the piece irks me a bit, because I did, of course, date a woman who travels, and am currently married to a woman who travels—and it is great! If I’d read this blog and canceled the wedding, I would have really missed out—on getting my deposit back! (Note: But also on my wonderful life.)

Indeed, the very day the author published this piece, my wife had just returned from Lilongwe, Malawi where she was living and working in public health, to Washington DC, in order to marry little old me. Then, a few days after the wedding, she went back to Malawi and I went back to sharing a not-up-to-code appartment in northwest DC with two other dirtbags.

So I can’t help but be a bit agitated by a piece that I find has a very narrow definition of travel in a self-congratulatory, “look at me I am this self-actualized person unlike you sheeple” sort of way. I don’t exactly have a problem with that—I am a sheeple after all. The author should live her life exactly as she wishes, if she can pull it off economically, and maybe even if she can’t. That said, people living that life on a trust fund—and I have no reasons to believe she is— should consider crowing a bit less.

Oh, and to anyone who thinks this is sour grapes on my part, well yes, it is. Obviously.

I am definitely a little bit jealous. How can you not be? Except for the crippling anxiety that kind of financial uncertainty would cause me, that’s an amazing life. But it’s one that I am simply too risk averse to lead. Though I will confess, I’m curious about what happened to the author. Her blog ends in 2015. As best I can tell from searching the good old internet, she’s been running a small resort in her native Philippines for the last eight years. Good for her. As much as my natural instinct to schadenfreude makes me want the carefree to get comeuppance (note: remember, me=sheeple), my better angels hope she’s still living that unencumbered life.

But the piece articulates only one way to be a traveler. It’s a good one though. My brother tried it for a year or two. After working summers for a number of years at a church retreat island (note: way more fun than it sounds) off the coast of Portsmouth, New Hampshire (motto: no Russo-Japanese wars since 1903 1945), he and his best friend there went to Colorado to work at a ski resort in search of eternal summer or at least fun winter. He then spent one season working as a hand on a small ship running Alaska cruises out of Seattle. As a result, my brother has a Seattle phone number despite having spent, perhaps, a week there in his entire life.

He once said to me “You have no idea how bored you can be until you are on watch looking into the blackness for icebergs at four in the morning.” I believe that. I knew a guy who had, during a stint in the army, stood watch over the Korean DMZ. He said all they ever did was hope a tiger would stumble across a land mine. It never happened. Same thing. My brother subsequently went on to have a very successful career as the exact opposite of a deck hand, a Massachusetts public school teacher.

But that’s not the only way to travel. Being a traveler, even an ambitious one, is not mutually exclusive with having a career or even a family. (Note: Though it should go without saying that if you don’t want either of those, that’s up to you, not me.) As a man, I don’t have the whole fighting against gender expectations thing to contend with, but I have found some of the most meaningful and interesting travel experiences in my life have been with my kids.

I was extremely well-traveled prior to having my first child five days shy of turning 42. I’d been to 65 different countries, the vast majority of them independent from the government work that got me overseas periodically. Within minutes of our daughter being born, my wife told her “Baby, we’re going to show you the world.” She meant it. In the six years since then, I’ve added another 12 countries. My daughter has already been to 16 countries (note: and four continents) and her three-year-old brother has been to 10 countries. I like lists!

When our daughter was about five months old, my wife had back-to-back work conferences in Goa, India and Bali, Indonesia—tough gigs. She suggested the baby and I join her, and after initially balking because I was being stupid, I realized it was a chance for the three of us to travel to exotic locales for the cost of just one plane ticket, and I’d be nuts not to do it.

Our pediatrician just advised us to keep her away from other kids since she was a month too young to be vaccinated for measles, give her a liquid anti-malarial mixed with what appeared to be raw peppermint leaves (note: good luck), and have a good time.

The flights went shockingly well. Yes, I spent an hour or two walking the aisles and bouncing the baby, but when you have an infant you can often get a bulkhead seat that comes with a little basinet, so the baby can sleep throughout. Really the only problem we had with the flights was that baby L learned to bite on the return trip, effectively ending nursing at the most inconvenient possible time.

In both Goa and Bali, L opened elements of local culture to us that we simply never could have had access to otherwise. Middle class Indian tourists in Goa would just come up to us and ask to hold our baby, or make “hand us the baby” motions with their hands if they didn’t speak English, and then pour their hearts out to us about their families and children or lack thereof. In Goa, one couple, while holding L, told us they wanted a baby but had recently had an abortion. I am almost sure they meant miscarriage, but it was still a level of intimacy I was stunned to have with complete strangers.

L holds hands with an Indian stranger in Goa.

In Bali, groups of Indonesians crowded around L’s stroller and asked to have their pictures taken. At restaurants, waitresses would scoop her up and bounce her around the dining room so we could eat.

She was a major Balinese tourist attraction.

The only problem, really, was that we couldn’t keep her away from other kids who could potentially expose her to measles. Even though L just learned to sit up on that trip, the instinct of children to seek each other out was simply too strong to overcome, and I was too overjoyed to see my little girl finding commonality with children from half a world a way to stop her.

We followed that trip by joining my wife on another trip work trip to Norway with recreational stops in Sweden and Iceland. We were keeping our promise—we were showing our girl the world and continuing to see it ourselves.

Then came COVID (note: going viral to far more than 3,900 people) and ruined everything for three years. We fared better than most, but travel was impossible and we lost our second opportunity to travel with a baby. C won’t miss it. Babies don’t know. But I missed it.

Just as traveling solo cannot be replicated by travel with a family or even a partner or friend (note: or why I go to the Balkans alone) traveling with a baby is also special. It opens up a kindness and warmth in a society that is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to access in any other way. When people see you with your baby, they think of themselves with their babies, however old those babies are now, and the feelings generated are so universal that there is a connection, an intimacy, that could otherwise only be built over weeks if not months.

Traveling with older kids has its own charms too, for example, eating much more ice cream, despite coming with costs such as losing the chance for long hikes, be they rural or urban. (Note: Small children do not like walking 12 miles around a Bulgarian city.)

So I respectfully disagree. Do date a girl who travels, and, if you want, raise a baby who travels. Travel is not just about the yoga schools, the dive classes, and throwing yourself out of a plane. (Note: In fact, for me, it’s never been about any of those, as I have no interest in flexibility, excess atmospheric pressure, or falling.) It can also be about finding weird playgrounds and watching your kids try to make friends across languages, traditions, and cultures.